Sunday, August 24, 2014

Rita Costello, Four Poems

It’s no accident that Hank Lazer and David Saffo both built their poems with reference to phenomenology, which
works its way through bodily processes towards a world that is never quite
immediate, or never quite accessible as immediate. (As Merleau-Ponty put
it, “Since perception is the ‘flaw’ in this ‘great diamond’ [he’s alluding to
lines of Valery’s that translate ‘My repentance, my
doubts, my constraints / Are the flaw in your
great diamond’], there can be no question of describing it as one of the
facts that happens in the world, for the picture of the world will always
include this lacuna that we are and by which the world itself comes to exist
for someone.”) The body—our first vehicle, but also the source of our first
alienation—is constantly reaching, or, more hopefully, grasping; yet it is
thrown into the world and history already decomposing, a vastly
imperfect correspondent. We’ve spent that history, and we spend our lives,
searching for ways of mediating this imperfection: cuneiform writing, the
abacus, the telescope, the typewriter, the Stratocaster, the silicon diode, the sonnet, the M-16.

Rita Costello is wonderfully attuned
to this sense of ongoing, embodied mediation. Her poems here invoke all sorts
of tools, all of them fallible, all in circulation around the body or bodies,
all of them somehow in on a Nietzschean joke of ceaselessly proliferating
perspectives echoing into a void. Or maybe that’s me—Rita, I think, shows
greater cheer and more hope than I do regarding the ways in which we build
ourselves into the world—that’s what we want, to be sure—with our instruments,
our vehicles, our media. (JM)

press

Back
in the days of the daisy-wheel

typewriter—spinning
out dervish dance

letters—we
ruined our eyes in shop-class pinching

fingertips
like tweezers down on singular

shapes
of ten-point type. And, with crane-

like
motions, we rescued letters from the alphabet

tray
lowering them slowly, pseudo-steady, down

into
lines of meaning, or at least as much sense

as
seventh-graders can make from such great

resources
as letters and language, which is probably less

than
an infinite number of nimble-fingered monkeys. I

imagined
sometimes, Sesame Street style, the steel-carved

A’s and T’s and D’s atop their
firm-squared bases

as
buildings—the model city, the sky-scrapers I

would
someday walk between, collecting

the
meaning of the world from their surface, like an

ampersand
pressed, long and hard, into the skin

of
an index finger, at least temporarily marring

the
genetic code, the identifying lines that in a room-

ful
of ink and sticky-rolling presses marked everything

as
personal. Those nights I dreamed a hand

of
sentences—firmly centered and set in the once silver

circle
now rolled flat blue with ink—and stamping

out
the lines even the most novice palm-reader

could
interpret clearly.

on the
release of Adolf Eichmann’s prison writings,

February 2000

Confronting an actual Eichmann,
one had to resort to armed struggle and, if need be, to ruse. Confronting a
paper Eichmann, one should respond with paper.

—Pierre
Vidal-Naquet

Thin papers amass bulk only by unimaginable

numbers
stacked—fighting numbers

with numbers, innocent victims alike.

Thirteen-hundred pages still fit in a box too small

for a single body. It would take a lifetime to write

a mass grave, a thousand blue pens in place of
blood.

essentially the same

mirrors and copulation are abominable,

because
they increase the number of men

—Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

I
blame my birth on propaganda, not the sort to entice

blonde
breeders to the Reich, but that good old American right-

eousness
in exposing the faults of others. My mother
in the third

grade,
good Catholic girl suddenly made impure with the realization:

If
we’re saying this about them, what are they saying about us? I imagine

to
get there she must have seen her own world in that other; how else

could
such transubstantiation occur: one moment trusting blind

faith
in all authority, then bodiless, nation-less, questioning of all

existence.
The body is only a consumer of bread
as malleable as the funhouse

mirror.
The world splits to so many mirrored images, that all our poles

are
fractured multiplication. Humanity
as a whole meaningless against us

and
them. Old as shadows in Greek caves or two-headed creatures broken. We

are
never solid. Searching only brings us closer to the mathematical eyes of the
fly

as
the only way to see ourselves—here
a people, here a thought, here a war—and all the fly

is
attracted to. Don’t we all want to think of molecular science as mythology? My

atoms
will never, have never been part of another, of you, of the brick wall

I
keep running into, arms thrust out, fingers splayed and cracking with the

force
of speed not really mine at all. But the propaganda is all shifting

to
seek stillness anyway; borders that do not bleed and eyes so dead

all
perception melds to singular substance: the mass that raises the bath-

water
is never part of the water. The thoughts of children are always swayed

by
educational filmstrips. This bread is my body, take me into yourself and

believe,
a body is a temple, sculpted, freestanding, closer-my-god-to-thee architecture.

Paradelle for Grandma, Just Moved to Assisted Living

When
her mind went, she couldn’t remember

when
her mind went. She couldn’t remember

the
wind echoes ripples across the water.

The
wind echoes ripples across the water.

The
water remembers her when she couldn’t;

across
the went-mind, wind ripples echo.

She
could not remember the day they took her;

she
could not remember the day, they took her

away
from the home where deer awoke her mornings.

Away
from the home where deer awoke her mornings,

from
where the deer took her day. They remember

mourning
away the home; the her she could not awake.

Her
mind stayed home, though her body moved

her
mind. Stayed home, though her body moved

the
mountains, her eighty acres, three ponds, and

the
mountains—her eighty acres, three ponds—and

her
body moved though the eighty mountains and

her
mind stayed home: her three-acres pond.

The
mornings moved her home, her echoes went though

the
deer, the day, her three ponds, her—remember

eighty?—
acres, mountains, mind. She awoke

water.
She couldn’t remember the ripples and where

they
took her wind across, when the body

could
stay home, not away from her mind.

Originally from New York,
Rita D. Costello has lived all over America (and China). She is Director of
Freshman/Sophomore English at McNeese State University and co-editor of the
anthology Bend Don't Shatter. Her
work has appeared in journals such as: Glimmer Train, ACM, Baltimore
Review, Fireweed, Pank, and Hawai’i Review.